How the Navy’s Warship of the Future Ran Aground

With an enormous splash and cheers from spectators, the 378-foot-long vessel Freedom slid sideways into the Menominee River in Wisconsin. It was Sept. 23, 2006, and the U.S. Navy had just launched its first brand-new warship class in nearly 20 years.

Freedom also represented a new strategy. Where previous warships had been tailored for open-ocean warfare using guns, missiles and torpedoes, Freedom — the first so-called Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS — was designed for a new kind of coastal combat. It was smaller, more maneuverable. And instead of relying on sheer firepower, it carried few of its own weapons. Instead, it would function as a mothership for super-sophisticated robots that would do most of the ship’s fighting.

Freedom was also cheaper than older ships: just $600 million, compared to more than $1 billion for most other vessels. The Navy hoped to buy as many as 55 LCSs for around $40 billion, reversing the U.S. fleet’s steady numerical decline that began in the late 1980s.

There was so much promise invested in one “small” ship. “It comes none too soon,” Adm. Mike Mullen, then chief of naval operations, said of Freedom‘s arrival, “because there are tough challenges out there that only she can handle.”

But the fanfare and Mullen’s optimism masked deep problems in the LCS program. Freedom was years late and $400 million over its original cost estimate. None of its robotic systems was ready for combat. Five years later, they still weren’t ready, preventing Freedom from undertaking any real-world missions more serious than a Caribbean drug hunt.

The LCS’ biggest problem, however, was conceptual. Five years and billions of dollars into the LCS program, the Navy still hadn’t figured out what the coastal combatant was really for. Today, the sailing branch is no closer to an answer. “Apart from the Navy’s inability to properly forecast how fast these ships could be built, fielded and paid for, there is a similar tone-deafness to how they will be employed,” ace naval journalist Christopher Cavas wrote.

What is the Littoral Combat Ship? Is it a heavily armed brawler meant to wade into bloody coastal battles and sacrifice itself while taking out multiple enemy missile boats? Is it a mine-clearer? A sub-hunter? A low-cost patroller ideal for slowly stalking pirates, drug runners and weapons smugglers and training alongside allied navies?

Is it a small, fast amphibious ship for slipping teams of Marines, Navy SEALs and river troops into an enemy’s coastline? Is it an ultrahigh-tech mothership for carrying diving, sea-skimming and flying robots? Is it an affordable version of the Navy’s large destroyers, meant for the export market? Is it the flagship of an industrial scheme designed to revamp American shipbuilding?

The answer is … all of these things. And none of them. The LCS has attributes suited to each of the above tasks. The problem is, some of these attributes cancel each other out — and the Navy lacks the clarity and discipline to decide which missions the LCS should keep, and which should be assigned to other ships.

The confusion over the LCS’ roles has gone on so long it has created a bizarre feedback loop, with the Navy, its shipbuilders, the Pentagon and America’s regional commanders each developing plans and technologies for the LCS based on conflicting assumptions. The result is a warship theoretically capable of almost anything, and increasingly optimized for nothing.

“The Navy risks investing in a fleet of ships that does not deliver its promised capability,” the Government Accountability Office warned. But the GAO is being altogether too kind: The LCS is already failing to deliver, today. And the damage to the Navy, and to U.S. national security, could last for decades.

The Single-Serving Warship

How did the Navy get to this point? The answer is a complicated one, involving: a pair of very persuasive Navy strategists, a domineering “transformation”-obsessed secretary of defense and a Navy chief eager to please him, and some unforgiving mathematics.

In the late 1990s, the Navy realized it had a problem. Its 9,000-ton cruisers and destroyers, inherited from the Cold War, were great for open-ocean warfare against the Soviets. But the same ships were considered too vulnerable to safely operate in the shallow, crowded, chaotic coastal waters — aka, the “littorals” — that were fast becoming the next naval battleground.

When the U.S. Navy first looked at the threat, it decided that bigger was better for near-shore waters, because a bigger ship can absorb more missile hits. So for its new coastal warship, in 2000 the Navy selected the so-called DD-21, a 15,000-ton behemoth.

Two Navy strategists, on the other hand, were thinking small. Retired Capt. Wayne Hughes, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, had been refining a new theory of naval warfare that favored large numbers of small, specialized vessels. At the same time, Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, head of the Naval War College, had begun testing a similar small-ship concept for near-shore warfare he called “Streetfighter.”

The term soon became synonymous with a 1,000-ton, heavily armed ship costing just $90 million in 2001 dollars. “These smaller, more single-purpose warships are the capital ships of a 21st-century fleet,” Hughes said.

But a warship of just 1,000 tons’ displacement would be too small to survive a direct hit, so Cebrowski and Hughes said it should be disposable — and could be, because it’s so cheap. “We must expect [the small ships] to suffer wounds, some of them fatal,” Cebrowski said. After taking damage, the Streetfighter’s crew would abandon ship — making it, in essence, a “single-serving” warship.

And that was a problem for the mainstream Navy. “The Navy does not and has never built expendable ships,” analyst Raymond Pritchett later pointed out. Some critics began calling the Streetfighter the “ship designed to lose.” As of mid 2000, “the official Navy response was to opt out, and then ignore, this critically important debate,” explained Bob Work, then an analyst with Washington’s Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Then in July of that year, Adm. Vernon Clark assumed leadership of the Navy, and six months later Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon for what would be a tumultuous five-year term as secretary of defense. For Cebrowski and Hughes and their small, expendable warship, everything changed.

Or did it?

Full Speed Ahead … to Where?

Rumsfeld (pictured above with Clark on the right) swept into the Pentagon in early 2001 promising “transformation.” “We have to … take risks and try new things,” he said at a conference organized by Cebrowski. That included adopting the “lean” practices of the business world, doing the same jobs with fewer people.

To Rumsfeld, the gigantic DD-21 destroyer represented the old-fashioned approach to warfare. Small ships with small crews — that was the future to Rumsfeld. In October 2001, Rumsfeld assigned Cebrowski to head the Pentagon’s new Office of Force Transformation. A few days after that, Clark canceled DD-21 and replaced it with a “family” of ships that included the LCS.

It’s possible, Work wrote, that Clark “reluctantly accepted the LCS only after it was clear that Secretary Rumsfeld expected the Navy to pursue the program.”

It’s also likely that Clark was at least partially motivated by industrial and budgetary concerns. One of his major initiatives as chief of naval operations was to expand the then-300-strong fleet to around 375 vessels, reversing its 20-year numerical decline.

The problem was, the Navy was and still is getting only $15 billion or so per year for new ships. With most vessels costing more than a billion bucks each, before LCS the Navy could afford only around nine ships a year, and sometimes as few as four — too few to grow the fleet. “I think 14 ships per year are necessary,” Congressman Edward Schrock (R-Virginia) a Navy booster, told a trade magazine in early 2003.

The Navy expected each LCS to cost just $220 million. That would allow the sea branch to buy five LCSs per year, boosting maximum annual ship production to Schrock’s goal of 14. It could be that Clark saw the LCS as the only way to grow the fleet, fast.

In 2003, Clark declared the LCS his “most transformational effort and my number-one budget priority.” The Navy would design and build the ships with “lightning speed,” said Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton. In the span of just three years, the Navy had changed course 180 degrees on small warships.

Inasmuch as Hughes and Cebrowski were right about small ships, the Navy’s fast attitude adjustment was admirable. The problem was that the new LCS effort was mostly attitude.

For all Cebrowski’s and Hughes’ passion about small-ship theory, and Clark’s and Rumsfeld’s determination to build the diminutive vessels, no one had clearly defined exactly what a small warship should look like, and what it should and shouldn’t do. On at least one key point — expendability — the strategists and the mainstream Navy were totally at odds.

No one had taken the time to clarify the LCS requirements and reconcile that important difference. A Navy official shocked some members of Congress in 2003 when he told them that “rigorous analysis” of the LCS concept came after the Navy had already committed to the program and its (then) $15-billion price tag.

The only thing everyone agreed on was that the LCS would sail close to shore. But no one specified how close “close” really was. One mile? Twenty-five miles?

As theorists, Hughes and Cebrowski never had to be specific. Rumsfeld, for his part, was notorious for ignoring the nitty-gritty details of running the military. Clark tried his best to keep his boss happy and grow the fleet.

“As a result, the Navy’s leadership was forced to test out arguments for the new ship on the fly,” Work recalled. “Sometimes the LCS was labeled transformational because of its high speed … other times it was because the ship was designed to defeat ‘asymmetric’ littoral threats.” On still other occasions, the Navy chose to emphasize LCS’ supposed “transformational impact on the American shipbuilding industry.”

“The constantly changing rationale for the new ship helped to confuse both the Navy’s internal and external audiences,” Work concluded.

In short, the circumstances of the LCS’ genesis were a perfect recipe for a shipbuilding fiasco.

Creeping Requirements

The Pentagon has a term to describe its own tendency to add more and more missions and equipment to a weapons system in development — “often to the point of absurdity,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented. “Requirements creep” can render a new weapon too complex and expensive for practical use.

With no clear vision for LCS, requirements creep happened fast. What might have been a small, cheap and simple coastal warship soon became big, expensive, complicated … and not necessarily suitable for shallow waters.

In the months after Clark committed the Navy to purchasing at least 55 LCSs, an LCS Task Force formed to decide on the ship’s design and missions.

Their starting point: LCS would not be expendable. It had to be tough enough — meaning big enough — to absorb combat damage and still limp home.

Already, LCS was growing in size well beyond what Cebrowski and Hughes imagined. It wouldn’t be long before the Navy’s new “small” ship got even bigger. Just one thing about the vessel would remain scaled-down: its crew. While destroyers sail with at least 300 people, each LCS would carry just 75. Automation and out-sourced maintenance would, in theory, compensate for fewer hands.

The task force assigned six different missions to LCS, including sub- and mine-hunting, combat against small boats, intelligence gathering, the transportation of Special Forces and peacetime drug and piracy patrols — all in shallow water. The near-shore vessel would be big enough to sail across the Pacific on its own and carry at least one helicopter.

None of these missions was new for the Navy, but each was — and is — being performed by a different type of ship. Sub hunting and defense against small boats are the purview of large frigates and destroyers and their helicopters. Mine hunters are tiny and slow, better to avoid setting off mines. Intelligence ships are unobtrusive.

In trying to replace all these ships with just one new vessel, the LCS Task Force realized it had a problem. It was impossible. A destroyer is not a mine hunter is not a transport. The task force’s initial recommendation was that the LCS actually encompass three totally different ships, working as a team — the largest of which would weigh in at around 3,000 tons.

Plug and Play

Since the Navy was only willing to build one ship, it should be the big one, the task force advised. The group believed that “through modularity, organic combat power and use of unmanned systems, this corvette could cover the range of missions identified,” analysts Duncan Long and Stuart Johnson wrote (.pdf) in a 2007 study.

“Modularity” meant leaving enough open space in each LCS for sets of weapons and sensors, each optimized for a particular task. “It’s going to be ‘plug and play,” Rep. Schrock crowed.

Module-swapping should take just a day, the Navy said. And to allow the LCS to switch modules in some friendly port then return to combat quickly, the ship would need to be faster than previous vessels: at least 40 knots, 10 knots faster than a destroyer. Never mind that the speed meant terrible fuel efficiency.

The unmanned vehicles the task force envisioned would come with the modules. A planned antisubmarine module would include a pair of sonar-equipped robotic boats plus a robotic minisub and a Fire Scout robo-chopper. A mine-hunting module would feature a mine-detecting, submersible drone.

As the Navy prepared to award the first LCS construction contracts in 2004, none of the modules even existed outside laboratories. Without them, the LCS was little more than an overpriced car ferry or an ugly yacht, with only a single gun and 11 self-defense missiles to justify the label “warship.”

As it happened, the two prototype LCS “seaframe” designs the Navy selected for a planned “sail-off” were, in fact, a ferry (from General Dynamics and Austal) and a yacht (built by Lockheed Martin).

That’s right. As if the LCS program weren’t convoluted enough — now the Navy was planning to build two entirely different types of ships, both allegedly ready for the same missions.

At the time, the Navy expected to select a single design and contractor and quickly build three LCSs over five years before bumping production up to five LCSs per year. In parallel, the Navy would also build 90 mission modules. Each ship would cost just $220 million and each module $150 million, the Navy insisted.

Three years after LCS sprang half-formed from the strategists’ theories, Rumsfeld’s corporate philosophy and Clark’s kowtowing, the Navy’s thinking for the vessel amounted to: Build something, anything, fast and cheap. Any problems encountered along the way would be fixed with the modules and robots.

The plan was, in a word, ambitious — which was not what Cebrowski and Hughes had in mind when they argued for the Navy to add smaller, simpler, cheaper ships. In the course of just four years, the Navy fought, embraced, and then completely corrupted the small-ship philosophy. Instead of compact, brute-simple coastal brawlers, it would get over-inflated, gas-guzzling, gutless ships dependent on ultrahigh-tech gizmos. Every degree of uncertainty regarding the basic LCS concept added another degree of complexity to the still-unbuilt robots and modules.

Even if the Navy’s 2004 LCS plan had gone off without a hitch, it would have produced vessels unrecognizable to most practitioners of coastal warfare. As it happened, the LCS program went completely, and predictably, off the rails.

Frankenstein’s Warship

The cost per ship more than doubled. To the Congressional Budget Office, this came as no surprise. CBO pointed out that, since the late 1970s, new Navy surface combatants have tended to cost “$250 million per thousand tons” in 2009 dollars. Following that rule, Cebrowski’s target of $90 million for a 1,000-ton Streetfighter in 2001 was optimistic, and the Navy’s goal of $220 million for a 3,000-ton LCS was delusional.

Rising costs caused a panic in Congress and the Pentagon. Through 2008, lawmakers and Navy officials canceled five LCS production contracts, delaying seaframe production by several years. Introduction of the first fully ready module got bumped back even farther, to 2017, and module production numbers shrank by a third. Now there’d be only slightly more modules than ships, essentially forcing each LCS to stick to one mission.

Plus, the modules themselves lost capability. A 25-mile-range boat-killing missile, part of the anti–surface-warfare module, failed tests, so the Navy canned it and substituted a cheaper missile with a mere five-mile range.

With every delay to the seaframes and the modules, the synchronization between the two broke down, resulting in vessels without weapons, and weapons development increasingly divorced from real-world conditions.

The LCS was a Frankenstein’s monster of incompatible ambitions even before the hulls and modules began their inexorable drift apart. By mid-2011, the Navy had two LCSs in service — one each from Lockheed and Austal. Neither had deployed on any serious overseas missions, in part because both had serious mechanical problems resulting from their rushed production and crews that were too small for routine maintenance.

But that didn’t stop a grab bag of entities from devising competing plans for the LCS’ use. In the absence of clear missions and realistic capabilities, LCS became everything to everyone, as long as no one thought too hard about anything.

A Ship in Search of a Purpose

The ideas and experiments began to take on an air of comedy.

Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, Freedom‘s first skipper, spoke of using the ship to literally run circles around Somali pirates, sinking their boats with Freedom‘s gigantic wake (see the video above). The comment was meant to highlight the LCS’ ability to thwart pirate raids without killing anybody, but it also highlighted the LCS’ relative lack of armament — and the mutated capabilities of a large ship designed for high speed. The LCS has a boat-tipping wake because it sprints at 40 knots, an attribute that’s otherwise mostly useless.

And especially useless if you’re sailing with a carrier strike group that tops out at 30 knots, which is exactly what Pacific Command assigned Freedom to do during one ill-conceived 2010 exercise.

Cruising the open ocean also made a mockery of the “littoral” in LCS’ name, and drew a sharp rebuke from Adm. John Harvey, Fleet Forces Command boss. “It was designed, built and manned to specific littoral missions and is not meant to run with a carrier strike group in blue water for an extensive period of time,” Harvey told Congress about the LCS.

Which is something Lockheed and Austal are both hard at work on — except not for the American LCS. Instead, the shipbuilders are both scrambling to install radars and surface-to-air missiles in order to compete for a potentially $20 billion Saudi warship deal. A Saudi LCS would be the most heavily armed version of the vessel, by far.

But that’s not at all how Capt. Jerry Hendrix, a widely read Navy strategist, sees the LCS evolving. Hendrix said the LCS should stick to hunting mines for his proposed “Influence Squadron,” a new Navy combat organization meant to deliver advisers and humanitarian aid to needy coastal nations. Nothing in Hendrix’s scheme requires the LCS to be particularly fast or well-armed.

The Thunderdome vs. humanitarians debate is more than just some obscure debate over naval policy. It shows that, after a decade of poor planning and weak leadership, no one knows what to do with this ship.

Bad Timing

But the LCS is special (though not unique), for it is the major product of an effort to expand the Navy during a time when sustained budgets made it just barely possible to do so.

The opportunity to cancel LCS came and went three years ago. Clark had retired. So had Clark’s successor. Rumsfeld had been fired. The new chief of naval operations was Adm. Gary Roughead, a man with a reputation for shipbuilding discipline. His new boss was Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, a mostly clear-headed manager with no appetite for Rumsfeld’s “transformation” nonsense.

Roughhead and Gates vowed to get shipbuilding under control. And they apparently succeeded. Under their combined watch from late 2007 to mid-2011, Navy shipbuilding gradually “turned around,” Pritchett wrote, “from the lowest point in over a century of four ships a year to an average of 9.75 ships per year.”

Worse, LCS is still years away from actually performing front-line missions. In a sense, LCS artificially inflates the apparent size of the fleet. In 2016, LCS will account for nearly a third of America’s surface combatants, but still won’t have combat-ready modules — meaning there are few dangerous missions it’ll be able to handle.

The chance Gates and Roughead had to restore shipbuilding rates will not recur anytime soon. President Barack Obama and Congress are talking about defense cuts totaling at least $400 billion over the next decade. Meanwhile, the Navy admitted that its existing ships are rusting away due to poor maintenance, increasing downward pressure on the size of the fleet. The maintenance crisis is partly a result of Clark’s and Rumsfeld’s efforts to reduce the size of ship’s crews, an initiative that heavily informed LCS’ design and bodes poorly for each ship’s lifespan.

If 10 years ago Clark and Rumsfeld had taken Hughes and Cebrowski’s admittedly vague vision and turned it into a useful coastal warship, the Navy would be in much better shape. The sea service would have possessed an effective, affordable vessel design at just the moment when a real shipbuilding Navy chief — Roughead — arrived on the scene. Roughead could have accelerated production of that ship, and today Hendrix and Pacific Command would be experimenting with a tough, useful, little warship, rather than struggling to shove the misshapen LCS into a bunch of different conceptual boxes.

Instead, we have the LCS, the “wrong ship at the wrong time,” to quote retired Navy Cmdr. John Patch. “It is clear that the Littoral Combat Ship program cannot live up to expectations,” Patch wrote in January. “Yet the surface Navy still badly needs low-end ships.”

It’s a need the Navy cannot now meet, thanks to the overwrought, underthought LCS and its human enablers. So we might as well learn to do without.

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